How Dead Island hopes to live up to emotional trailer

Dead Island first came to the attention of the world thanks to a cinematic trailer that painfully reconstructed the events of a family torn apart by a zombie outbreak. It was a powerful piece of work that drew plenty of attention to the game. What it didn't show was any sort of gameplay, instead creating a potentially unrealistic representation of the emotional gravity of the experience. But the team behind the game doesn't regret the decision.

Because while that debut trailer may not have been representative of how the game will play in any way, the studio believes that it was important for setting the overall tone of Dead Island.

"You have the debut trailer out there and the debut trailer is talking about the fate of a family on the island and how this zombie outbreak destroys the perfect holiday, the perfect family, and the perfect piece of earth that they were going to enjoy," Vincent Kummer, brand manager for the game, told Ars.

"This is actually the tone that we want to have in the game... When you wander around the island and you are the last hope for people that are struggling on the island that are trying to survive, you're going to meet people and you're going to [take on] quests and you're going to help those people that are trying find family members, trying to get in touch with other survivors."

Whereas a game like Dead Rising focuses on the more humorous aspects of a zombie outbreak, it seems the team working on Dead Island is set on making a serious, emotionally driven experience. One example Kummer gave was a quest in which a husband asks you to kill his recently zombified wife, forcing you to make a tough decision to ease both of their pain.

Dead Island

"So it's not just walking around fighting all the time," he explained, "but you will be in this emotional surrounding of the survivors of that island."

The setting of the game—which takes place on a vacation resort on the fictional tropical island of Banoi—also lends itself to this more serious tone, forcing you to witness the steady destruction of a picturesque location.

"The resort for us was a picture of something beautiful that goes completely bad," Kummer said. "You go and start off something that seems like paradise, and just tear it apart piece by piece. And that's the same thing that happens with the resort itself. It starts off with an attack and then you wake up and you feel that the whole island is being torn away. Somehow you go there and are now the best hope of the other survivors, and you try to help them in their struggle for survival—it goes on from there and just gets worse and worse."

Our hands-on time with the title at E3 definitely revealed it to be a game with a serious tone, but whether that tone can come close to matching the emotion created by the teaser trailer remains to be seen. Dead Island is coming to the PC, PS3, and 360 on September 6.

Listing image by Dead Island screenshot courtesy Techland

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